


Wildflower In Winter

by dawnstone



Series: Wildflowers of Thedas [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Cured Tranquility, Dead Orlesians, Fix It, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Name Changes, Post-Masked Empire, Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Tranquility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 07:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30052311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstone/pseuds/dawnstone
Summary: Felassan should have died. Rendered tranquil by his oldest friend, he was dead inside for all intents and purposes, cut from the Fade and all of his emotions—that is, until he crossed paths again with Imshael.(Takes place immediately after the events of The Masked Empire novel (and between Part 1 and Part 2 of my Wildflowers series, but neither of the fic need to be read for this to make sense as it's more of a fix-it explaining why he's still alive in the later fic).)
Relationships: Felassan & Imshael, Felassan & Solas (Dragon Age)
Series: Wildflowers of Thedas [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/875817
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Wildflower In Winter

Waking from an empty silence, the elf who called himself Felassan breathed in cold in the pale early morning. His head throbbed, his body felt stiff, snow and leaves drifting around him. The fire he'd expected to die next to burned itself out in the night, leaving him shivering and alone.

Memories of the dream the Dread Wolf cut him off from flooded back. Though he understood what happened, he didn’t feel angry or sad or fearful, only the weight and the pains of his body.

Numb and empty beyond the headache, nothing more. The words settled within him and felt true. He’d cheated death again, but it brought no satisfaction. 

Solas wouldn’t have left him like this on purpose. He disliked loose ends, and, even more so, leaving an unclean kill behind to suffer. 

So much of the world had changed, with the creation of the Veil—not the least of which how magic worked at its most fundamental level. Changes which Solas only familiarized himself with in the last year as he walked again among mortals. A miscalculation like this would not have happened ages ago. The Dread Wolf's efforts were almost entirely focused on recovering his power, and so perhaps his magical skills had taken a blow, too.

Solas hadn’t hesitated to try and kill him though, and Felassan had known he wouldn’t.

He’d held concerns about escaping him before their last meeting, but severed from the Fade as he was, Solas would never find him. He wouldn’t even think to look.

A positive outcome, but not one Felassan could appreciate in this state.

He managed to sit up, and chafed his hands together to restore circulation. One elixir from his stores would give him resistance to the cold, and he kept several for healing, but spending them before his situation was completely unsurvivable seemed imprudent. As long as he could move, there were places he could go for shelter and food, no need to use the potions yet.

Slowly, he processed the situation, and tried to choose where to go next. With his injury impeding so much, he needed to find help to heal it, but because of it none of the possibilities available pulled at him. Before, he’d have had very specific preferences. Places where he could find a companion for the night, a good meal, or safe solitude if desired.

The lack of any emotion interfering did give him sharp focus under the pain. He considered certain taverns he could go to, and the workers there, whether the conditions within were shabby or fine, smelling more of cooking or alternately of filth. He remembered a place which was kinder to outcasts, elves, and broken people. A place where he still had a friend unconnected to any of his other pursuits.

A friend...

Solas was one of his oldest friends.

Even so, he used Felassan like he used all of his people. A tool he’d trusted to carry out his will, handed a duty and an important part of a dangerous plan. The duty became null and void, as did his usefulness, the moment he betrayed the mission.

Felassan recognized he needed to disrupt his work completely, if he intended for this world to survive in any form. Perhaps he could do it in this state, but he'd still need help.

An artifact of the old world tugged at him. Such life-altering circumstances demanded he take on a new name, and he couldn’t use the old one in any case.

The elvhen called themselves after what they considered their defining quality, things such as joy or sorrow or pride. Solas’ old name echoed in his mind, though it didn’t wrench at him like it once had. He’d said the old one no longer belonged to him, though the man didn’t disavow being called Fen’Harel. Similarly, Felassan didn’t fit, nor his first name from before he’d joined the Dread Wolf’s cause.

Whether by accident or not, he’d become something like a _tel’nal_ , an empty one. Such beings had no passions, no defining purpose but for the simplest tasks, a shell with no soul or desires or dreams. A husk either abandoned by their spirit, or cut off like him, or waiting to be filled by one.

He bore an acute awareness of his surroundings and a sense of self, so he was not entirely like them. As if probing an open wound he examined his consciousness again.

Where once he might have stood and enjoyed the view of nature by light of morning and the quality of the air, the mossy ground and the blowing frost, it evoked no interest and held no meaning. Such observations held immense importance to him just the day before.

The only way he could change his situation, if he chose to do so, required him to reestablish a connection with the Fade.

Ways existed, of course. Methods he’d learned over the ages, after seeing others injured similarly and recovering. The simplest—to find a spirit and get it to aid him. A strong spirit could bridge the gap with ease and restore what he’d lost, but calling upon one without magical assistance might prove near impossible. Finding the wrong spirit, or calling in a demon, could do more harm than good, too, if its core idea impressed too heavily upon him.

At the heart of his true self he had held close particular values related to his liberty and pleasure—and pride. Currently, most of them made no sense, and in fact seemed impractical, but he could quantify their absence by how much of his oldest memories were devoted to them. Ancient memories all rendered as formless and insignificant as an airless empty cavern.

The spirits who had known him also knew Solas, thus he could not call upon any of them. Ideas spread like contagion, and it would only take a single one to clue him into the fact he lived to oppose him.

Drawing one to him might take months or years, for even a spirit already in the material world would not easily perceive someone without any emotion. Even then, such a spirit would likely have turned corrupt and rendered dangerous to interact with.

Sitting and thinking in one place for so long left him feeling the cold more deeply, and he finally decided to seek shelter. There lay a hillside cave, not far, which might yet have supplies stashed in it, if no wayward traveler had stumbled upon them.

He kept many such caches; he’d never stood still for long, in constant preparation for their next move, the next part of their plan to restore the elves.

Felassan recalled as if from a distance his obsession with a man who regarded him disposable. So many damaged memories of what brought them together, to the point of being willing to die for their cause and for their people. The empty hole where all the passion had lain seemed particularly deep there, but he couldn’t parse it further. Loss of love made an empty crater of him.

All of the logic behind those decisions sat out of reach, rendered nonsensical without the attached emotion; to even contemplate it made his head ache worse. For a moment as he walked, he felt dizzy and nauseous. All of his feelings now were merely physical, if duller—the sting of chapped skin, the pounding in his head, the dryness of his tongue. His stomach growled for the rabbit he’d eaten the day before wasn’t enough to sustain him long.

He kept on steadily towards his chosen destination. The dark of night hadn’t obliterated him, nor had Fen’Harel; no frostbite yet, no illness, he’d survive for a while even hungry. 

When he went into the city he’d call himself simply Fel, which could mean slow or inert or quiet, and stay away from humans as much as possible. If he saw someone who knew him, he’d decide then if they were useful to talk to, for he didn’t want it to get out to the wrong elves he yet lived. Perhaps he could seek out Briala eventually, but he had no way of knowing how far she had gone, nor the password for the eluvians. With her bond to Celene broken, she was as homeless as a Dalish.

By the time he found the low-ceilinged cave, the day was half done, and his whole body cold and shivering. The clothes he’d worn as a mage who could keep up passive barriers against the weather, were inadequate without magic there to protect him. In one corner enough dry firewood sat stacked to last for one night, and he could make a fire easily enough without magic. Not everyone he’d met over the years needed to know he was a mage. His many years of service to the Dread Wolf made him very good at such deceptions.

Once the fire warmed him enough and he stopped shivering, he huddled into his cloak and slept for the first time without expectation of dreaming. When the fire dwindled, he woke again and his stomach growled more loudly than before. Thirsty, he sought his waterskin, though it needed refilling. He built the fire up, then began preparations for a longer journey from what remained of his supplies and what he could scrounge. The small cave held the useful items he had expected—a battered but usable bow, extra strings, a quiver with several arrows, a rust-tipped spear, a set of overlarge boots, and a rough wool tunic wrapped in an oiled cloak. At first light he would hunt, and eat, take his potions to bolster him, and then move on.

* * *

For ten days, the man who now called himself Fel, walked, taking the shortest route he knew to Montsimmard.

He stopped only briefly to eat, and slept whenever he found adequate shelter, though he didn't feel exhaustion as keenly as he had before. Once, he took his rest in a collapsed barn, another in a crypt, and another in the hollow of an enormous tree. He couldn't dream, though it occurred to him later that each location was the sort of place he would have sought out when he could. A habit he had picked up long, long ago. Each morning, too, he listened as the birds sang with the sunrise, the leaves and grass rustled with the wind, the sound of cattle and sheep in the fields as he passed. He perceived the colors and the scents and sounds, but the world around him held none of attraction he remembered. Inside, he was as passive as a mirror, observing, reflecting, but not responding. 

He took his meals mostly from the land—more than once broke a hole in the ice covering a creek and speared the fish from above like a heron, and with the same spear dug for edible roots and grubs from the hard ground. Those which he’d disliked as plain or regarded as last resort food, were just a way to fill his belly. Flavors and textures did not feel good or bad, so he didn’t season any of it, though he could tell an overripe berry or if meat spoiled.

Absently, to fill the empty caverns of his mind as he walked, he listed off the names of the flowers and herbs and trees he came across. He collected specimens of the rarest and most useful ones, even if dry and desiccated, for they could be sold later. Another old habit, though now it was accounting rather than curiosity or a way to relieve boredom. After a while, he recited the names in each of the languages he knew had words for them, though most were variations of the Alammari and Elvhen ones this far south. Except for certain flowers, his recall of such things seemed largely unconnected to his emotions.

On the sixth day, he came across a dead group of Orlesian scouts. All five of them in Celene’s colors, dismembered or bled out. Butchered by another band of their fellow countrymen, most likely. Their bodies lay where they’d fallen, except where small animals tore at the frozen corpses—the wolves and bears hadn't found them yet. The spattered gore did not make the cold snap of practiced pre-battle calm settle down over him as it would have in the past. Their packs looked untouched, other than a few sliced by blades in the fighting. No traps he could see, no dead animals nearby, so likely no poison. 

As dispassionately as he would have before his injury, he darted in and scavenged their remaining rations. Along with these, he found a good knife with no identifying marks and a handful of coins. Items of use for a traveler heading to an expensive city—practical considerations like this changed little for him.

Soon, with his pack significantly heavier, he walked on.

Knowing the Dales so well gave him advantage against most of the dangers lurking its wildest portions, and in avoiding where demons tended to coalesce. Though a winter storm could whip across the forested hills and bury him, or he might cross into the territory of a great bear unknowing. With war imminent, he did keep his distance from the Imperial Highway, avoiding the growing patrols of Chevaliers and Orlesian soldiers as best he could. 

He estimated his destination lay only an hour or so away, when he came to a noisy crossroads near what he knew to be the edge of the forest.

There, several well-armed humans wrestled a noose around another man’s neck. Arms tied and mouth bound, the man tried to fight, kicking with his feet and whipping his head around. They weren’t Imperial soldiers as far as Fel could discern, with no uniforms or high-quality armor, but they didn’t have the homespun look of farmers turned to banditry, either. Mercenaries of some stripe, he decided.

Among them, standing slightly back from the shouting and chaos, he noticed someone familiar.

At this, Fel stepped slowly into the brush at the side of the road so as not garner any attention and watched.

Once the humans had the man where they wanted him, they threw the hanging rope around a thick branch, then two of them heaved on it as the other wriggled and choked. A demon in the shape of a man grinned behind them all, rocking on its heels, clearly enjoying the proceedings.

Finally, the men tied the rope to the tree’s trunk and then they waited, their scowling faces full of hostility and anger. When the figure stilled, the small party growled their last curses at the body and turned and made their way towards the city. 

The demon stayed, still smiling, unnoticed by the rest. It sighed.

“There’s a dead space living and breathing behind me, drenched in the lingering flavor of the easiest yet hardest choice someone ever made. Where did you come from, I wonder?” it said, and turned.

Fel didn’t see it move more than that, but one moment the demon stood in the clearing and the next it stood directly across from him. An expression of what resembled delight played on the demon’s face.

“Oh my.”

* * *

“Imshael.”

He kept still, remembering he should fear it, but he could reason with it. Then for a moment he felt a flash of feeling, of real fear and apprehension. The demon’s aura loomed large and brushed up against his damaged internal landscape even from several feet away.

Imshael folded its arms across its chest, and it cocked an eyebrow at him. “Well, well, well. What do we have here? I almost didn’t see you Slow Arrow. And I’ve been looking.”

“That is no longer my name. Call me Fel.” He watched the demon’s face while licks from it’s presence made him tremble, uncertain whether it would kill him, or simply walk away. It did neither.

Imshael threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, I see. Lost your arrow then? There are herbs for that. But listen to you, silent inside and blank as the face of the moon. How delicious. How did it happen? Some sadistic Templars? They always make for a good time.” His broad grin showed teeth which were noticeably sharper than a human’s.

Fel shook his head. “Fen’Harel tried to kill me. He failed,” he said, his voice flat and detached.

“Or half-succeeded. That does seem to be a theme with him. Weren’t you two friendly? Oh, that is some prime drama. It almost makes me want to help you.” The demon giggled some more.

“What would make you wish to help me? A sacrifice? A favor?” He was unlikely to get another opportunity like this one. Though it might still kill him, or try to possess him. Fear brushed at him again—he might as well have died if he was reduced to making deals with a Forbidden One. Desire bubbled up behind the fear—he wanted the rest of himself back at any cost, anything.

“Hmm, both very tempting. I could just possess you, I suppose. It’s no sport when you’re like this to start, though. I could ask you to do anything right now and you wouldn’t care, until I made you care.” The demon’s brow furrowed, likely tasting his awakened desperation, making it look thoughtful.

More tendrils of the demon’s influence crept into him, and he could feel a longing well up, along with other more mixed emotions, whispering at him from a great distance. “True. My ability to choose is intact, but I have no desires to make it more than an exercise in logic. I’d have to have my connection to the Fade fully restored. I think you know you've started the process just getting this close to me.” 

Imshael snarled, his teeth even sharper than before. “Ugh, disgusting. Fine. I don’t know precisely what you did to earn this, but I can taste the ripples. A truly delectable decision—wish I was there for it.”

Fel shuddered at the rush of feeling screaming into him, while a thin moan of distress escaped his throat, almost a wail, as the demon closed. Then Imshael put its taloned hand on his forehead, and fully reached inside of him, grabbing at a thread of ether and tying it back to a tattered and mangled one on the other side.

While Imshael held him in place, he trembled violently, body and spirit, as everything felt again.

The woods around him immediately became too much—too gnarled and yet too pretty. Too wild and yet comforting, smelling delightfully of winter and fallen leaves—but also horribly of rot and decay. The Fade flooded back into him, through a raw channel, every nerve singing, his shattered spirit distantly howling beyond the Veil. With a cry and then a sob, he staggered and then fell to his knees. His empty stomach lurched, and he vomited bile, while his head felt on fire.

Luckily, there were no other demons around, because they were too terrified of Imshael. He wasn't certain if he could resist possession in this state.

Imshael stood over him wearing an amused expression. It hadn’t even tried to make the process easy on him.

“You owe me—and you’re going to need another new name already, aren’t you? Seems like that could get confusing, but those old elvhen habits die hard.”

Fel let out a shaky breath, tears streaming down his face. “Perhaps more of them should. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a splitting headache, and a wolf to catch.” 

His bravado didn’t match his current ability, of course, but he liked to put on a good front, despite. Honestly, first, he needed to heal, and to avoid the Fade as much as possible. Then he needed to get out of Orlais, far, far away from Solas’ operations surrounding his orb and the local eluvian network. Too many people knew him here.

“Heh. Try not to get killed too quickly,” said the demon. It looked over its shoulder at the swinging corpse hanging not far from them. “That one decided to steal his companions gold to pay off his gambling debts. I would have helped him kill them all, but he turned squeamish in the end. His friends, not so much.”

Bitter memories surged forth, along with all of the emotions he'd had no way to express until now. He scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand, but tears kept coming. “Every friendship has its limits,” he said. “But I’m not going to ask you for anymore favors.”

“Naturally. You know I won’t be the one that tells him,” said Imshael. Then with another throaty chuckle, the demon melted into the air, heading northeast toward Val Royeaux.

Another place to avoid for the foreseeable future.

Under the weight of his regained senses, Fel kept on towards Montsimmard, nonetheless. Even in the alienage of such a wealthy city, he could catch up with what rumors were on the wind about the war, and supply himself for a longer trip elsewhere. The Marches seemed his best bet. Kirkwall supposedly had settled down, but was still a hub for news and trade—and Solas had yet to make deep inroads there with his network of spies and informants.

For now, while he healed, he'd keep a low profile and his ear to the ground. For now, he'd watch and wait.


End file.
